Virgin Media reveal Samsung Galaxy S4 Pricing

So far plenty of carriers have announced their intentions to stock the device and now Virgin Media have thrown their hat into the ring.

As ever, Virgin Media don’t just give their subscribers airtime and data limits, also thrown in for existing customers is inclusive insurance, inclusive calls from Virgin home phone to Virgin mobile, £5 off your mobile monthly tariff, unlimited calls and texts to other Virgin mobile customers and something called Mobile Rescue which backs up all of your numbers and helps to locate a lost handset.

Pretty standard pricing for the S4, you can get it for free on a 24 month contract for less than £40. Most places are making you pay something upfront. In 3 months it’ll be free upfront.

Anonymous

Yeah, I was going to say it doesn’t seem like a particularly great deal to me… Suppose after the initial rush things will start to become a bit more reasonable.

The 16GB S4 is up for £580 on Expansys. Divide that by 24 and you get £24.17 per month. This means that if you pay £99 up front, and go for the £36 per month contract, you’re actually paying £16 per month just for the measly half a GB, 200 mins and 500 texts, which is a very poor deal indeed. Minus the fiver and it’s not even on a par with most of the top tier providers.

If you waited a couple of months and bought an offline S4 for around £400 (which I believe to be a realistic prospect), you could go for a monthly rolling “Ultimate Internet SIM 200” package on 3 for just £12.90 per month. Averaged out over 24 months, this would come out at just under 30 quid, yet give you unlimited Internet and enough minutes for most people. Plus, you wouldn’t be locked into a stupid contract, which is nice.

Oh, and I suppose the inclusive insurance is a nice thing to have, but I have no idea how good this is on Virgin – if it’s like most insurances, it’s probably not worth having.

Martin

I didn’t see the inclusive insurance, EE charge £10 for S4 insurance. If it is as good as theirs then it is (sort of) worth it. Brand new top-o-the-line phones are always an upfront cost for the first 3 months or so, you may be lucky and find a deal for free. My missus has an iPhone 4s, we got it in Feb, so it had already been out a few months, still had to pay £60 for it :( If it had been any other phone it would have been free and a better contract, cos it is Apple is costs you an arm and a leg, but she had to have an iPhone! I really, really wanted an Xperia Ray but being the tightwadd I am, I waited a few months and bought one off line 2nd hand for £120, well pleased with that :) After my whining a few weeks back about the insurance increasing, my daughter managed to get her SGS II wet and it died. I called Orange up expecting a nightmare, they were as good as gold, got me to try a few things (had already tried everything, including the rice trick), once we had gone through that they said we’ll deliver a new phone tomorrow, and this was a Saturday afternoon! Sure enough Sunday afternoon the new phone arrives.